Editor's Note: Copper-based fungicides play a decisive role in controlling bacterial diseases, whether evaluated in efficacy or market shares. At the same time, copper-based fungicides show high efficacy against some fungal diseases such as downy mildew, Alternaria leaf spot and brown blotches in fruits and vegetable crops. Due to the advantages of eco-friendship, relative safety, rare resistance and usage in organic agriculture, copper-based fungicides have steadily retained the sixth position among all fungicides.

Accordingly, AgroPages recently came up with a special topic surrounding copper-based fungicides/bactericide product and invited some key players in this field to share their views over the global market landscape, product series, core strengths, application situation, as well as future development prospects. The fourth interviewee is Dushyant Somani, director at Shyam Chemicals.

Q1: Could you briefly introduce the global market landscape of copper-based fungicides and future development prospects?

Copper fungicides are widely used across the world and since they can also be used in organic farming the future for them remain bright. Most customers we cater to today had the impression that only companies from South America where competitive for Copper Fungicides due to location of copper mines in those countries.. This is incorrect… Prices for the main raw material copper metal is the same anywhere in the world, it’s like gold same international price.. From our manufacturing location in India we offer global competitive pricing and quality for these products and for customers located in Asia / Middle East / EU a much shorter shipping transit time…
Q2: Could you talk about your company and its product line of copper-based fungicides, global layout and business model?

Shyam Chemicals was established in 1972 and today manufacturers a range of copper chemicals with various applications. Copper Chlorides in pigments and silicones. Copper Oxides and Copper Carbonates in wood preservatives and micronutrients. Copper Oxychloride, Copper Hydroxide, Bordeaux Mixture, Tribasic Copper Sulphate and Copper Sulphate Pentahydrate as Copper Fungicides. This differentiates us from other global copper fungicides players who are mainly focused on copper compounds used in agriculture where our is focused on several copper compounds used across several sectors.
Q3:What are the company plannings to launch new products and expand new marketplaces?

We will be offering WG formulations for Copper Oxychloride and Bordeaux Mixtures in the near future. We have ongoing registrations in several markets in Asia and Africa and hope to complete them in 2019-2020. We are also focusing on developing the Chinese markets and actively engaging with potential partners... Our own domestic markets in India also present great opportunities for Copper Fungicides and we will work towards launching new formulations / mixtures in the same..
Q4: What are your main challenges in the course of development and marketing of copper-based fungicides? How did you tackle them?

Regulatory hurdles are the main challenges we face while trying to develop new markets for our copper fungicides. Registrations take long time periods and also generating GLP data for them is expensive... Where markets are closed due to prohibitive costs to purchase access to registration data we focus on selling technical instead of formulations since regulatory hurdles for Technical is lower.

If you are also the player in the field of copper-based fungicides/bactericide products and would like to join the above topic discussion/promote your products, pls contact us via: grace@agropages.com